These cows almost killed Disney.

It was only five years ago that Disney ran up the white flag and did the unthinkable: it shuttered its 2D animation facilities. This is the Walt Freaking Disney Company: they invented animated movies as we know them. But a series of flops (Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range) at the same time as Pixar churned out a string of instant classics was too much for the Mouse House. They decided that the public clearly wanted computer animation, and that’s what Disney was going to give them.

Except that didn’t work either. 2005’s Chicken Little didn’t even make back its budget domestically. So in 2006, Disney took the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em route, purchasing Pixar for $7.4 billion (which actually seems like a steal to me). The Pixar people were suddenly in charge of Walt Disney Animation… and the first thing they did was get the 2D animation department back up and running.

John Lasseter and Co. were betting that audiences hadn’t stayed away from Home on the Range because it was 2D. They had stayed away because:

a) It was lame, but more importantly…

b) a trio of sassy cows wasn’t what audiences wanted to see from Disney.

Anyone who’s been around a little girl in the last twenty years knows that the old Disney films still resonate, maybe even more than the new Pixar stuff. In 2009, the Disney Princess line of merchandise netted over $4 billion for the company. In a way, the continuing popularity of those 2D films is what enabled Disney to buy Pixar.

So when they set out to make The Princess and the Frog, they had a tricky task: produce something that recreated what people loved about the old Disney movies (especially the early-90s triumvirate of Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin), but also something creative enough to get consumers back into the habit of reflexively going to Disney movies. It’s sort of like making a Bond movie–you need to stick to the formula, but also keep it fresh.

So how did they do it? Well, let’s go to the chart. (And by the way, bigtime Princess and the Frog spoilers begin now.)

In “Wrestling with Wild Things, Part 1“, I promised to go through the 2009 movies that made me cry and break down why I broke down. But I first spent some quality time with the most recent of the bunch, Where the Wild Things Are, parsing what it’s about and how it works.

I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way, because it’s time to turn on the floodgates.

Today, we talk about why memories make people sad, the narrativization of loss, advances in clinical psychology, and why everything you think you know about therapeutic art may be wrong. Oh, and there are references to Star Trek V and Wing Commander. You know, to get everybody in the mood.

The Wrestler, Wild Things, Up, and the secret to happiness, after the jump.

I’ve cried at the movies in 2009 more than in any year I can remember. Partly, this is because, while The Wrestler was one of those movies that came out at like 11:59.99 9/10 o’clock on 12/31/08 to be considered with last year’s Oscar contenders, I saw it early this year. It was easy to forget it was an Aronofsky movie until all the men in the audience realized it was slowly climbing the turnbuckle to deliver an emotional flying bionic elbow (holding a folding chair) — and deliver it did.

Partly, it is because Pixar is a bunch of toolbags who have nothing better to do than make evocative, complex, heart-wrenching animated films that reduce even grown men to tears — haven’t you guys heard of special forces guinea pigs, for crying out loud?! At least throw your name behind an action-packed, rock ‘em/sock ‘em Christmas Carol-themed Jim Kerry-fueled stream of urine all over Charles Dickens’s grave in 3D. Frickin’ Pixar and its love and loss and the mature employment of its craft in the search for emotional and existential truth — it’s like they never even saw Shrek 2. The nerve of some people!

But the latest maybe-it’s-still-on-ceulluloid-maybe-it’s-digital-I-am-not-that-kind-of-movie-buff emotional wrecking ball is Best Picture contender Where the Wild Things Are.

(With an increase to 10 Best Picture nominees announced for the upcoming Oscars, I’m calling a nomination, but not a win, right now. This movie is the real deal — a serious/significant work of serious/significant art — and not even the special Oscar-laundering cinemas that stay open all night can open ten different movies on New Year’s Eve.)

I’m somewhat shocked the other Overthinkers haven’t tackled this film more yet — so much so that I’m going to break my post up into smaller pieces rather than barf it all out all at once, as is my usual custom.

Why is 2009 the year of tears? What did the movies discover in the last 12 months or so that turned on the faucets for such cultural luminaries as Fenzel from Overthinking It and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper?

It all starts with growing up, growing old, and early childhood development, taught by psychedelic Tony Soprano. . .

Matthew Wrather hosts from the best coast as he, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and John Perich overthink Shark Week, TRON, baseball, the relationsip betwen Pixar’s UP and Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, and comparing things to Hitler.

Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend!

Download Episode 57 (MP3)

I started writing this as a rebuttal of Fenzel’s “Paradise Lost at Paradise Falls.”  In the process of writing it, my thoughts have gotten a little more organized, and I’ve realized that (as usual) I don’t actually disagree with what he wrote as such.  I just have a much more cynical spin on it.  You’ll see where our readings overlap… and where they conflict. I encourage you to help us fight it out in the comments!

I do still have one major bone to pick with Fenzel, and since this is an argument on the internet, there are certain protocols that must be observed. Therefore, I will start by rephrasing his argument in the most overstated and reductive way that I possibly can, to that it’s easier for me to find fault with it.   As I understand it, Fenzel’s post boils down to this:  Up is valuable because it addresses a central part of our life experience that is largely ignored by Hollywood:  the question of how we should live once we’ve moved past the teleological process of “growing up.” He adds almost as an afterthought that in some cases people simply graft themselves onto the narrative of their children’s adolescence…   but this, to me, is strange, because it’s a rather crucial detail.  The question is not really “how should I live,” but rather “how should I live in the absence of children?” Now, maybe this is still one of the hard questions, but the film provides the easiest possible answer:   it simply rejects the questions premises, claiming that any life without children is hollow.

Bold claims!  Can I back this up?  I dunno, but I sure did spend about a thousand words trying.  And if you’re interested, you can read them!  It’s like we were made for eachother.  You complete me, internet.  You.. complete… me.

Up 2: Next Year in Jerusalem

“He caught him up, and, without wing
Of hippogrif, bore through the air sublime,
Over the wilderness and o’er the plain,
Till underneath them fair Jerusalem,
The Holy City, lifted high her towers . . .

. . . There, on the highest pinnacle, he set
The Son of God.”

– John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book IV

The kindness of the world toward your existence turns out to be an illusion of youth, and all love dies. Man must keep his faith and promises, even as he ages toward death — find a place to stand firm, even as he falls.

Pixar’s Up and John Milton’s great poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are about more than what they have in common. A laundry list of their similarities would hardly be interesting (especially if you haven’t read the poems). But they meet at a critical and compelling place in what I like to call the Artistic Project.

This balloon is about to get heavy, so if at any point you need a little extra lift, bookmark this.

Now, let us go, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, to find our solitary way —

[First time guest writer Ferrett Steinmetz sends this dispatch, considering the implications of Up. It's spoilerrific, so the whole thing is after the jump. Proceed at your own risk.]

Matthew Wrather hosts as he, Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and John Perich reveal their favorite animated movies, give advice to a college student, debate tokenism and ethnic stereotyping, and think back to the good old days of Sesame Street.

In this episode, we also lay out a challenge for your mom.

Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. If you haven’t yet, take the very short survey! And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend.

Download Episode 48 (MP3)

If the greatest trick that the devil ever pulled was convinving the world that he didn’t exist, the greatest trick that Pixar has ever pulled was convincing America that this guy is adorable. Last year’s Ratatouille, which managed to get the people to fall in love with a typhus-infested sewer rat, was only a warm up for the seething cauldron of weirdnesss that is WALL·E.

WALL·E is cute, of course, and he’s also a robot, so that scores him some points.  But he’s also clearly insane.  Let’s look at the facts.  He spends his days going through people’s trash, and don’t say that it’s just his job, because no one is paying him.  He does this because he wants to, or rather, because his “programming” (the voices in his head) tells him he has to. Every now and then, he’ll fixate on a valueless object – a slinky, say – and take it back to his “house” (an abandoned storage unit) where he either A) incorporates it into a giant trash sculpture, or B) carefully files it in a drawer with dozens of identical slinkies.  (It’s this hoarding aspect of his behavior that really pushes his hobby past “charming outsider art” and into “crippling obsessive compulsive personality disorder.”)  Need more proof?  Every night – every night! – he watches the same movie, which doesn’t exactly scream “sane.”   And the first time he meets a woman, he immediately starts stalking her, harassing her at work and even following her back to her house.  Uh, what else?  Oh yeah, his best friend is a cockroach.

But this is all small potatoes compared to one early scene in the film, where WALL·E passes the rusted-out carcass of another Waste Allocation Lifter Loader, Earth-Class.  He looks at the shattered robot.  He looks at his own severly damaged tank treads.  He looks at the other robot’s shiny, perfectly preserved treads.  In the next scene, we see WALL·E happily zooming along on his new legs, without a care in the world.  What does this mean?  Well, it means that WALL·E is, at best, a graverobber.  And at worst?